Humanizing gun nuts: an anthropologist shoots down stereotypes about gun enthusiasts

Reason, Feb, 2005 by Eric Dzinski

These doctrines of self-reliance, toughness, and independence underlie a subculture that Kohn investigates thoroughly in Shooters: cowboy action shooting. More than an antique gun club, cowboy action shooting is a sport devoted to preserving the styles and ideals as well as the weapons of the Old West. Participants dress up in boots and hats and run through elaborate courses using period weapons.

Some of the most colorful characters in

Kohn's book populate her chapter on cowboy action shooting. Shooters with names like "Wild Bill Hiccup" run through target courses with cigars clenched in their teeth, playing out Old West fantasies. Kohn's analysis occasionally drifts toward questionable psychosocial generalizations, such as her claim that cowboy action shooting is an attempt to reclaim a "white, middle-class identity" through Wild West reenactments, despite participation by minorities and people of various economic classes. But by and large her account of this sport is delightfully thorough, especially to readers who had no idea it existed.

The chief weakness in this otherwise excellent book is Kohn's ambitious linking of ideas. Describing a shooter who thinks the world of gun enthusiasm is not demarcated by color, class, or gender, she writes, "This belief in the inherent diversity of gun enthusiasm as it's practiced is interesting for several reasons." Here and elsewhere, she uses the word inherent to link one belief held by a shooter to a wider, more abstract idea about shooting in general. The problem is that in the world of ideas (and certainly in the world of anthropology) there is no such thing as inherent connections.

People in different cultures will form entirely different concepts around the same object. Even two people in the same culture will make different connections between sets of ideas. At least once in Shooters, one of Kohn's subjects makes the point that while shooters all share at least aspects of the hobby, they come to it from different backgrounds and for different reasons. Kohn's emphasis on "inherent" beliefs seems out of place in a book that tries to map the diversity of ideas within the gun culture.

Although Shooters is supposed to be an ethnographic study of a particular subculture, near the end Kohn leaps to conclusions about the broader gun control debate. She argues that both sides of the debate must be willing to give up some fundamental assumptions and tactics in order to make gun legislation work for everyone.

She emphasizes, for example, that guns have been an integral part of American culture at least since the nation's founding and that no amount of gun control will ever bring about the fundamental change its proponents imagine. On the other side, she argues that gun enthusiasts must give up the belief that gun control has no effect on crime, citing laws that prohibit felons from owning firearms as an example of effective gun control. (She fails to mention that those same felons can still get guns illegally.)

Although Kohn's conclusions are thought-provoking and display a wealth of research about the subject, they depart substantially from her avowed purpose. They frame a discussion more suited to a general debate about the merits of gun control than to a targeted study of gun enthusiasm.